


Almost Shakespearian

by HyperionScience



Category: Borderlands
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Implied/Referenced Sex, Implied/Referenced Torture, Jack Has Issues, Minor Character Death, Other, Surgery, Tim Has Different Issues, poor Tim
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-30
Updated: 2016-08-30
Packaged: 2018-08-11 22:36:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7910248
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HyperionScience/pseuds/HyperionScience
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It bothered him just how used to it he was. It bothered him how easily he could stop bothering. He slept well, all things considered, because if the guns and grenades on Elpis didn't get to him, what was a man being strangled 20 feet away, in the throes of one of two great passions?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Almost Shakespearian

**Author's Note:**

> "Sometimes I'll start a sentence and I don't even know where it's going. I just hope I find it along the way." -Michael Scott, The Office
> 
> Yeah, just replace sentence with fic and... That's what I'm doing. Enjoy a Timothy Lawrence character study type thing that nobody asked for. Rated M for canon-typical sex, drugs, and genocide, as well as some somewhat graphic descriptions of surgery.

 Space is very quiet.

 

 Space is the type of quiet that's palpable, the type that sinks deep into your veins, the type of silence that fills a room, like water, and drowns out anything else that dares dwell in its space. Tim remembers his ECHO recordings of ambient space station noise, which he had blasted through his ears through sleepless university nights, but was disappointed to find that Helios made no sound at all. It was here in the eye where he felt most alone, standing at the window and staring out over Pandora, which seemed to lie still under the watchful gaze of the corporate giant. When Jack was away, the silence was viscous, the sounds of choked breath and gunshots and sex gone along with the man in a passionate whirlwind of poor decisions. The office was empty, and he was Jack, and all of this, on paper, was his. Even still he felt a shiver go down his spine every time he entered this room alone, as if he were treading on some sacred ground, as if this were Jack's, and only Jack's.

 

  _You are Jack._ He reminds himself, and from outside the eye of the giant the stars wink down at him knowingly. They, along with himself and Jack, will take this secret to their graves. He watches them a while, remembering how transfixed he had been by their nighttime gleam so many years ago, and how now they seemed to hold only a mischievous gleam which he wasn't sure he trusted. He had always assumed them to be within reach, but he had never been closer and he had never felt farther.

 

 He was wearing another man's face, for crying out loud.

 

 He sat down on a large sofa, tucked away from the window. He sat here when Jack was with him, so that the self-proclaimed hero could sit on the elevated stage at his desk at look down on him. He avoided, as often as possible, being here alone with Jack. Brief, half-complete memories swam through his head of his surgeries, and after those, his lessons. He had laid on this sofa for hours listening to Jack monologue, trying to commit as much as he could to memory so that if Jack stopped to ask questions, he wouldn't answer incorrectly and lose his morphine for the day. Those days had been the worst, the early days, where he had known so little and hurt so much and Jack was there, looming above him, pinching the hose of his IV drip shut and poking and prodding at his face. His legs had been the worst, he recalled with a shudder. He had been nearly half a foot shorter than Jack. It had been months before he could stand up and walk away from him, and it had been several more before he had been given the chance to finally go to Elpis. There were other snippets of memories that held no context, and he wondered what he had subconsciously chosen to forget. He stopped thinking for a minute, and the silence crashed over him like a wave, filling his veins with the creeping need for noise.

 

 Now that he was off Elpis, he practically lived on Helios, trying and failing to avoid Jack most of the time. He would sit on the couch and Jack would pace, and shout, and knock this over because he wasn't getting his way, because guns weren't selling, because there was still one more person to kill, and wasn't there always one more person to kill? He worried that jack would turn on him, but he never did. He kept his distance and nodded his head, shielding his eyes from shattered glass or splashes of acid from corrosive weapons as Jack ran his course, like a hurricane let loose in the gigantic office. He would always come down from it at the end, and he would be calm in an oddly still way, seeming to relish in the eerie silence of the station. The closest Jack had ever come to shooting him was when he had tried to leave and broken it, and thereafter he waited patiently to be dismissed before he moved a single muscle.

 

 His own personal room was just next door, in what would, in the future, become a wing of Jack's museum, the walls knocked out to install giant tableaus of Jack's conquests. It was a modest room, not big but not small, and it was fine by him, really. The bed was soft, the view was nice, and at least sharing a wall with Jack's office gave him some sort of ambient noise to listen to as he let the artificial night take him.

 

 The muffled sounds of murder, he reasoned, were better than nothing. It bothered him just how used to it he was. It bothered him how easily he could stop bothering. He slept well, all things considered, because if the guns and grenades on Elpis didn't get to him, what was a man being strangled 20 feet away, in the throes of one of two great passions?

 

 He worried about Jack, in spite of himself. He knew somewhere that the man was too far gone, that nothing could fix everything that had been done to him, be it the drugs, the sex, or the genocide. Jack wanted it all so bad, he knew, and he knew that if he ever got it, if his Warrior ever cleansed the planet like he said it would, he would feel nothing but a hollow pit. Mass murder wouldn't bring them back, and they both knew it. So here he was, lying on a plush sofa in the center of Helios, wearing the face of a psychopath who kept him around because he was legally obligated to understand. He thought bitterly of the Shakespearian tragedies from his literature classes, and how he used to ask how they were all supposed to relate to a couple of twelve-thousand-year-old plays where everyone dies at the end. It was real life, he knew now. Everything falls apart. Everyone dies in the end.

 

 Except for him. He had died a long time ago, on paper at least. Jack had made sure of that.

 

 It was times like this where he swore he could feel how much of his body was artificial. His face had been torn out, sanded down plastic used to lift his cheekbones and extend his chin, muscles resculpted with medical precision, a bomb placed somewhere behind his sinuses. It continued down his neck, and into his shoulders, his collarbone and shoulders all redefined, made wider, larger. Everything else was all artificial, skin synthetic, the muscles kept at exactly the right size with a variety of drugs. Every hair on his body had been grown in a lab and grafted to his body, none containing a single trace of his DNA. About 3 inches of his legs and arms were solid plastic, made to match bone density perfectly, each limb elongated to match a distinct set of specifications. The only thing they had left alone were his organs, aside from his eyes, which had been changed surgically to match Jack's mismatched glare, Earth and sky.

 

 All that was left of Timothy Lawrence was a fear of heights and a love of cats that they just couldn't beat out of him. He clung to these two things with white knuckles, the only remnants of a life lived so long ago. He hated that he had to fight for things so simple. He could feel it all slipping away from him, the worries and loves of his old life being pushed to the side by guns and corpses and staying alive, something that was only getting harder on Helios with Jack.

**Author's Note:**

> Wow that felt like a real awkward ending, but I didn't know where else to go with it. Maybe I'll write another chapter, or a follow-up. Maybe imply the ship a little more. I dunno. Comments are always appreciated!


End file.
